Article

Environment and Planning D: Society and

Heterotopia and the urban Space
2018, Vol. 36(2) 350–369

politics of climate change ! The Author(s) 2017

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DOI: 10.1177/0263775817747885
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Gareth A S Edwards
University of East Anglia, UK

Harriet Bulkeley
Durham University, UK

Abstract
Seeking to govern the city in relation to climate change is a political project that at once imagines
the present in terms of the future and the future in terms of the present. The urban politics of
climate change has brought multiple visions of the possibilities (and limits) of urban futures. In this
context, we find urban responses taking experimental form – creating sites through which to
explore and experience different futures. They provide spaces in which utopian visions can be
imagined, enacted and contested. Conceptualizing urban climate change experiments as
heterotopic sites seems fruitful in at least two regards. Firstly, it captures their provisional and
ambivalent relationship with the broader urban milieu. Secondly, and even more critically, it opens
up the dialogues between the future and present which are at the heart of the climate governance
project, and highlights the spatial form of these politics. We examine both with reference to two
examples of climate experimentation in Berlin and Philadelphia.

Keywords
Heterotopia, climate politics, Philadelphia, Berlin, climate change experimentation, Foucault,
governing the future

Two vignettes
#1 Philadelphia, USA
On 19 June 2010, the mayor of Philadelphia, Michael Nutter, joined residents of the 1200
Wolf Street block in the heart of South Philadelphia, 2.3 miles south of the Philadelphia City
Hall, for a block party to celebrate their success in winning the ‘Retrofit Philly ‘‘Coolest
Block’’ Contest’. A collaboration between the Energy Coordinating Agency (ECA), Dow
Chemical Company (Dow) and Mayor’s Office of Sustainability (MOS), the contest required
blocks (defined as every home on both sides of a street between two cross-streets) to submit a
petition signed by the homeowners pledging participation and submit a short essay of under

Corresponding author:
Gareth A S Edwards, School of International Development, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK.
Email: gareth.edwards@uea.ac.uk
Edwards and Bulkeley 351

500 words explaining why their block was the ‘coolest’ in Philadelphia (Interviewee, ECA;
Interviewee, Dow). Seventy-six blocks had entered, and 1200 Wolf St had prevailed (Dow
Chemical Company and Energy Coordinating Agency, 2011). A band played and children
splashed in a wading pool as a cherry-picker lifted residents and dignitaries to the terraced
skyline to view the white elastomeric ‘cool roof’ coating which had been applied to one of the
roofs in the block and would be applied to the rest over the next eight months, along with a
package of retrofits to improve the air sealing and insulation in the homes. The Mayor spoke
to the assembled crowd: ‘It’s because of Philadelphians like you, who have taken action to
save energy’ he said, ‘that we’ll be able to hand over a healthier, safer community to our
children. This will serve as a great example to the rest of the city that we can save energy and
become the greenest city in America’.1 A cool roof expert explained that cool roof coatings
like the one being applied to their block save money on air-conditioning, reduce the urban
heat island effect and could even slow climate change. Liz Robinson, the Executive Director
of the ECA, said ‘We feel this effort can be a blueprint for bringing communities together in
the interest of saving energy and improving quality of life’.2 This one city block stood as a
sentinel of the future city: lower carbon, better maintained, more liveable, and more
community-oriented (Edwards and Bulkeley, 2017).

#2 Berlin, Germany
Around the same time, just over 4,000 miles away in the German capital, Berlin, a small
group of people from Berlin Senate, Berlin Partner (the city’s PR arm) and virtualcity-
SYSTEMS (a company specialising in 3D city models) launched an initiative which also
aimed to transform the rooftops of the city. The ‘Berlin Solar Atlas’,3 funded through the
European Fund for Regional Development, added a new layer visualising the potential for
Solar Photovoltaic (PV) and Solar Thermal (hot water) systems on city rooftops to the city’s
existing 2D and 3D virtual model of the city. The proponents explained that ‘Berlin’s Solar
Atlas shows precisely whether a roof is suitable for using solar energy and whether the
investment will pay off. Possible electricity generation, CO2 savings and investment costs
are displayed in a single overview’ (Berlin Senate, 2011: 43). Browsing the Solar Atlas, one
is presented with a city full of potential. The roofs of buildings appear in shades of red, orange
and yellow depending on their suitability for solar PV (electricity) installations, and a separate
layer visualises those deemed suitable for solar thermal (hot water). Only a select few buildings
are not subjected to the solar calculus; the Brandenburg Gate is one, but the Berliner Dom
(Cathedral) is included. Clicking on a building’s roof brings up a bewildering array of
statistics: the possible CO2 savings from a solar PV installation, the potential energy yield
in MWh/year, the area of the roof suitable for installation, the likely cost of such an
installation and the achievable power. A further click opens a separate page with a ready
reckoner for the building, which can be saved as a PDF. The Atlas was seen as a way to
stimulate building owners to install solar systems, and thus facilitate the transformation of the
city’s rooftops into an inter-connected web of micro-scale solar power stations. One imagines
flying into Berlin at some point in the future, to be greeted as the plane banks on its final
approach to the airport with a city that is literally glittering as the sun catches millions of solar
panels mounted on its rooftops. Indeed, the vision of Berlin as a sparkling capital at the centre
of a new low-carbon economy informs the aspirations of the Solar Atlas. In the words of one
of its leaders, ‘Climate protection is a global challenge that we must rise to locally. Urban
conurbations must play an exceptional role in overcoming the climate problem. As Germany’s
capital city and a European metropolis, Berlin sees [climate protection as] its particular
responsibility’ (Berlin Senate, 2010: 7).
352 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36(2)

Climate change, experimentation and the future

As the governing of climate change increasingly finds expression beyond the confines of
international institutions, commentators have noted its experimental quality (Bulkeley
et al., 2015; Hoffmann, 2011). As a disposition, experimentation entails an ambivalence to
both the possibilities of the present and the potential of the future. Rather than operating
with the strategic certainty of many of the techniques and instruments of liberal government,
from integrated planning to economy-wide systems of taxation, experimentation implies a more
indeterminate relation to what might constitute interventions that improve, in this case, climate
conditions. This is perhaps unsurprising given the ongoing presence of both apocalyptic visions
and utopian promises within the climate discourse. On the one hand, responding to climate
change is about averting a looming ecological catastrophe, an apocalypse caused by the
untrammelled unfolding of present conditions into the future. On the other, responding to
climate change is about transforming and improving society, resolving a whole raft of pre-
existing economic and social ills through transitioning to a ‘low carbon’ way of life. Yet, what
such interventions might entail, and the (political, infrastructural, cultural) inertia they may
encounter, produces radical uncertainty about what it means to act in the present in relation to
a better climate future (Oels, 2013). Rather than being thought of as uncertainty in the sense of
an unknown that can in some sense be calculated, this form of radical uncertainty is better
understood as a condition of indeterminacy, where not only are the outcomes unknown, the
parameters against which they should be judged are open to contestation (Wynne, 1992).
Indeterminacy operates on multiple levels, from questions about who has responsibility to
act and what constitutes sufficient action, to more fundamental questions about what a
‘better’ future should entail, whether the ‘good’ being pursued is understood in terms of
development, increased wealth, sustainability, or well-being, to name just some of the
possible framings. Scholars have pointed to the growing use of calculation as a technique
liberal government uses to govern climate futures, and the way it serves to secure particular
kinds of future imaginaries, projects and subjectivities (Anderson, 2010; Braun, 2014;
Wainwright and Mann, 2013). Such forms of calculative rationality tend to regard the future
as knowable in relation to given parameters and seek to render this knowability visible in one
way or another, in order to secure particular interests or pursue particular forms of political
economy. Modes of practice which regard the future as not only uncertain but also
indeterminate must not only calculate possible futures, but demonstrate their potential by
enacting them in the present in order that alternative means of determining what constitutes
practicable or ethical or economic practice can be recognised. These modes of practice are not
merely neutral devices through which optimum social or technical solutions are derived, but
actively political in constituting particular kinds of future above others and in configuring the
nature and dynamics of power, capacity and responsibility through the assemblages they create
(Braun, 2014; Dalby, 2013; Delgado and Callén, 2017). As Gibson-Graham and Roelvink
(2009: 342) put it, ‘Small actions and networks can be seen to have sweeping global effects,
and rapid large-scale change can emerge from diffuse local transformations.’
In this paper, we seek to better understand how climate change experimentation engages
with futures through forms of calculation and demonstration, contributing to debates about
both climate politics and the governance of the future. Our focus is on one domain in which
climate experimentation is increasingly being documented: cities. Within urban studies, the
rise of the ‘experimental city’ is seen as closely entangled with the shifting terrains of urban
governance and politics, often manifest in relation to issues of climate change and
sustainability (Evans et al., 2016). For example, Karvonen and van Heur (2014) warn of
the importance of accounting for the ways in which the emergence of ‘urban laboratories’
not only enable more progressive visions for urban futures but also contribute to the politics
Edwards and Bulkeley 353

and practices of neoliberalization. Seeking to understand the equivocal position of urban

experimentation, accounts of the urban politics of climate experimentation locate it precisely
as a means of government through which the ‘will to improve’ the city in relation to climate
change is realised through enabling flows and circulations (Bulkeley et al., 2015). From
Foucault’s essay on the town, climate experimentation is seen as a form of
governmentality which ‘works on the future . . . that is not exactly controllable, not
precisely measured or measureable’ (2009: 20). Experimentation provides a disposition
through which liberal government can navigate uncertainty and indeterminacy to
implement ‘knowable’ actions – such as reducing Greenhouse Gas emissions – to improve
the condition of the population while also demonstrating that this is possible without
undermining other forms of improvement such as economic growth, quality of life, or
social justice (Bulkeley et al., 2015).
To develop and extend this conceptualisation of the politics of urban climate
experimentation, we engage with Foucault’s (1986: 24) concept of heterotopia, understood
as ‘a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites . . . that can be found within the
culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.’ We start our investigation
by exploring the utopian and dystopian images which have framed much of the debate about
the effects of climate change (‘Utopia and dystopia in the climate changed city’ section),
before examining the links between the literatures on urban climate change experimentation
and the governance of the future. We argue that urban climate governance is fundamentally
shaped by dialogues between the future and the present, in ways that go beyond existing
notions of anticipatory action (‘Governing the future: Anticipatory action and urban
experimentation’ section). This leads us to the concept of heterotopia, which we consider
in more detail in the section ‘Heterotopia and the performance of urban climate governance’.
In the penultimate section (‘A heterotopology of climate change experimentation’),
we return to the two vignettes of climate change experiments with which we opened the
paper. These were drawn from a broader study which examined the emergence and
implications of climate change experiments in cities around the world (Bulkeley et al.,
2015). Research visits were undertaken to Philadelphia in October 2011 and to Berlin in
December 2011 and January 2012. Semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders and
participants were the core methodological tool (28 in Philadelphia; 18 in Berlin),
supplemented by site visits and documentary analysis. We use these vignettes to illustrate
our argument that it is appropriate to understand urban climate change experiments as
heterotopic sites and that such an understanding offers conceptual insights to scholars
interested in both climate change experimentation and the governing of the future. We
offer some brief reflections by way of conclusion (‘Heterotopia, experimentation, and the
politics of precariousness’).

Utopia and dystopia in the climate changed city

Methman and Rothe argue that climate change ‘marks the crossroads between apocalyptic
doom and universal salvation’ (2012: 329), and as cities have moved from the fringes of the
climate change debate to occupy a central position within it, the city has been placed firmly
on these crossroads. In popular culture, dystopian imaginaries are particularly abundant.
For instance, on 1 September 2015, a sculpture was unveiled on the foreshore of the Thames
as part of the Totally Thames festival, which each year celebrates the role of the river in
London’s life. Entitled ‘The Rising Tide’, the installation by Jason deCaires Taylor consisted
of four horses with riders. The head of each horse was stylized to match the horsehead on an
oil well pumpjack, and each day they were submerged twice by the rising tide, re-emerging
354 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36(2)

with the ebb tide.4 This apocalyptic imagery is typical of popular culture representations of
urban futures in the context of climate change. In the 2004 film ‘The Day After Tomorrow’,
the impacts of rapid climate change are understood in terms of the havoc a phalanx of
climate-related disasters wreak on Los Angeles, New Delhi, Tokyo, and particularly New
York, which is overcome by a catastrophic flood. The future being imagined here is bleak,
characterized by widespread water shortages, extreme weather events, sea level rise and
catastrophic flooding, viscerally apparent in the city in the breakdown of infrastructure
systems including water, electricity and transport (Methman and Rothe, 2012; see also
Dalby, 2013).
But utopian visions of the future are equally apparent. For instance, the ‘Postcards from
the Future’ exhibition held at the Museum of London from October 2010 to March 20115
consisted of a series of images representing possible futures for London. In it, alongside
dystopian images such as Hyde Park transformed into a giant shanty town, were much more
utopian images showing it as the location of new energy futures based around tidal, wind or
nuclear power, where even sea level rise had the curious effect of transforming it into a
peaceful – almost comforting – larger-scale version of Venice. These artistic urban
imaginaries articulate neatly with the option-framing undertaken by organisations such as
the International Energy Agency (IEA), which in a 2009 report contrasted the possible
future with and without a transition to a decentralised and decarbonised energy system
(IEA, 2009). The IEA report opened with two visions of the future city, framed in
Dickensian terms: the reader was invited to visualise the ‘best of times’ and the ‘worst of
times’. Failure to achieve the transition envisaged would usher in a future characterised by
energy shortages, urban congestion and limited supplies of potable water. In short, it was
seen as a road to urban dysfunction and dystopia, at least in the formerly ‘developed’ world.
Success, by contrast, would usher in a future characterised by clean, vibrant and connected
communities; a technological urban utopia strongly reminiscent of the managerial utopias
imagined and planned in earlier eras – from ideas of the Garden City to Le Corbusier’s
visions of modernist urban planning (Bradley and Hedrén, 2014; Pinder, 2010).
Often, these utopian visions are technocentric, seeing ‘salvation’ in the more widespread
adoption of current technologies or the introduction of emergent ones, both of which are seen
to overcome current dependencies on unsustainable energy systems or the predicted effects of
climatic changes. For instance, a range of urban actors – including private sector companies
such as Arup and IBM, but also NGOs such as Greenpeace – have proposed variants of ‘smart
urbanism’ as the solution to climate change. For them, technological innovation and
particularly the increasing use of digital connectivity provides the tools needed to overcome
the conjoined environmental and social challenges climate change poses to cities (Luque-Ayala
and Marvin, 2015). However, not all utopian visions envisage such a top-down modality of
governance. Less established in mainstream discourses, but nonetheless prevalent, is a vision
that might be termed ‘decentralised engagement’ (Foresight, 2008: 117). Here, a future is
imagined in which multiple actors develop measures that provide low-carbon energy and
transport, or address urban vulnerability and foster resilience ‘from the bottom up’.
Initiatives such as the Transition Town Network are pursuing a mission of

actively and cooperatively creating happier, fairer and stronger communities, places that work for
the people living in them and are far better suited to dealing with the shocks that’ll accompany our
economic and energy challenges and a climate in chaos. (Transition Network, 2013)
For Transition Towns, this is accomplished through new forms of food and energy provision
located in cities, and managed through collective action. More mainstream initiatives use
different language, but likewise emphasise how self-governing communities can be enabled
Edwards and Bulkeley 355

to provide and sustain their own resilience, energy security and so forth. Despite significant
divergence on the roles and importance of technology, economy, government and
community, there is a remarkable convergence between these utopian visions, which
centres on their conversation with the future.

Governing the future: Anticipatory action and urban experimentation

Ben Anderson has observed that ‘In the enactment of better worlds, the future is
constantly being folded into the here and now; a desired future may act as a spur to
action in the present, for example, or action in the present may bring back memories of
long-forgotten hoped-for futures’ (Anderson, 2010: 778). This dialogue with possible
futures is deeply embedded in urban climate action in the present, whether technocratic
or community-focussed, mainstream or radical, utopian and dystopian (Bulkeley, 2013).
For Swyngedouw (2011), the fear of an impending climate apocalypse is used by elites to
justify the need for ongoing consensus-based governance efforts, foreclosing the
possibility of ‘proper politics’ (i.e. conflict and dissensus) which could lead to real
alternatives being developed, and a growing number of scholars have drawn parallels
between the risk-based framings of climate change and debates about anticipatory
action in the context of national security (Dalby, 2013; Oels, 2013). In addition to the
discursive folding of the future into the present noted as a component of a broader post-
political condition, we observe in climate change experiments a material folding of the
future into the present, an enactment and contestation of alternatives which is both
temporally as well as spatially contingent (Williams and Booth, 2013). Anderson (2010:
779) suggests ‘calculation, imagination and performance’ as three modes of practice
through which futures are made present to various extents. Calculation involves giving
shape to possible futures by combining knowns about the present with modelled
projections. Imagination involves a process of scenario building through more creative
channels to envision plausible futures. Performance involves the actualisation of the
future in the present, for instance through the use of exercises, simulations and games.
Each is connected to both ‘styles’ and ‘logics’. The former are statements which allow the
future to be referenced as a category; the latter are programmatic actions undertaken in
response to particular futures (Anderson, 2010).
Reflecting on the utopian visions discussed in the previous section in terms of these modes
of practice, it becomes clear that while their ‘solutions’ to climate change are radically
divergent, each engages in a process of calculation through which they account for and
rationalise the uncertainty of the future, in the process at least implicitly asserting a
certain ‘knowability’ about it. They also all share an imagination; a sense of the
possibilities of the city and of the ways in which responding to climate change is not only
a matter of addressing a global environmental challenge but also of reconfiguring urban
systems and daily experiences. But they also share a common indeterminacy; namely the
potential effects and side-effects of their enactment. It is this indeterminacy, along with the
inertia of existing socio-technical systems and governmental dispositions, that creates both
the space and the possibility for experimentation.
Climate change experiments are interventions in the name of climate change which seek to
transform the socio-technical nature of the city (Bulkeley et al., 2015). Led by a variety of
actors – ranging from municipal governments to NGOs and small and large businesses –
they have widely varying agendas and can be found in a range of sectors, including energy,
the built environment, water and waste. Despite a rapidly growing literature on urban
experimentation (Evans et al., 2016), little attention has been devoted to the way it
356 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36(2)

navigates the interface between the present and the future (De Búrca et al., 2014). One of the
reasons for the rapid growth in interest in experimentation is because it is seen as an important
mechanism through which to resolve some of the indeterminacy implicit to responding to
climate change. By acting as a space to ‘try out’ new ideas – be they about energy
efficiency, energy provision, consumption patterns or social practices – experimentation
provides insight into the effects and side-effects of reconfiguring urban systems in the
context of climate change. In Anderson’s terms, these insights are generated because
experimentation brings the future into the present through performance. But whereas
Anderson (2010: 787) situates performance in terms of hypotheticals (‘playing, pretending,
acting’), which can take place across the surface of existing urban conditions, experimentation
involves forms of demonstration that are embedded in and necessarily connected to the
existing urban milieu.
Anderson argues that the performance of futures generally ‘involve staging a specific
possible future (whether in live or artificial time), and participants then playing or
performing a set of roles’ (2010: 786). He gives the example of an exercise held in the
USA in mid-2001 in which a bioterrorist attack was simulated to generate experiential
knowledge of a hypothetical future. His example here comes from the work of Stephen
Collier, who cites it as one example of what he terms a ‘style of reasoning about risk’
(2008: 229); an equally valid alternative mechanism to know and assess risk to that of the
dominant ‘archival-statistical’ style typical of the insurance industry. Both Anderson’s
and Collier’s work is situated within a broader literature on governing futures which is
concerned with the anticipatory logics of liberal governance in an age of risk, and focuses
primarily on (national) security, read through a biopolitical lens (Adey and Anderson,
2012; Anderson, 2010, 2012; Aradau, 2010; Aradau and Van Munster, 2007; Collier,
2008; Collier and Lakoff, 2008; Cooper, 2006; Dillon and Reid, 2001; Lundborg and
Vaughan-Williams, 2011; Massumi, 2007, 2009). Collier’s point is that there are many
forms of reasoning which seek to know uncertain futures, and that the process of
enactment has a particular affective quality to it: the planners involved in the exercise
come to feel the scenario they are embedded within. Similarly, Collier and Lakoff (2008)
argue that vulnerability mapping, developed to help planners in the USA be ready for
events such as a catastrophic terrorist attack, has the effect of shifting how they actually
view the city: ‘the very systems that had been developed to support modern urban life
were now sources of vulnerability and, as such, likely targets of enemy attack’ (Collier
and Lakoff, 2008: 19). Even more importantly, they argue, the ‘distributed preparedness’
paradigm which vulnerability mapping facilitated has expanded in remit from disaster
preparedness to homeland security, with the paradoxical effect of reinforcing the
securitized state it was originally intended to help avoid.
The point here is that performances or enactments of possible futures, though they deal in
hypotheticals, have both affective and material implications for how the actual future plays out
by shaping planning, infrastructure, bureaucracy and indeed governance in the present. We
might say that the present is shaped according to logics of the (still uncertain) future, or as
Anderson (2010: 786) puts it, that ‘The space of the exercise becomes an occasion for
experiencing how a future event might feel’. Anderson’s (2010) performative mode of
practice and Collier and Lakoff’s (2008) notion of enactment share a common feature,
which is that the future is only ever imported into present in a transient fashion – as
hypotheticals, parameters into a game, model or scenario. In this, they are building on the
work of Brian Massumi (2007) about the ‘affective presence of the future’, to convincingly
argue that the logic of distributed preparedness, originally developed to counter the potential
for a Cold War nuclear attack, became pervasive as the way to think about and manage for
Edwards and Bulkeley 357

across a wide range of possible threats (Collier and Lakoff, 2008). Massumi actually goes one
step further, arguing that the metabolism of the future by the present has become pervasive in
the logic of pre-emption, which mobilizes potential threats ‘in such a way as to make present a
future cause that sets a self perpetuating movement into operation’. In other words, pre-
emption creates effects in the present which are justified by uncertain and indeed
unknowable potential futures, and these effects justify further pre-emption even if the initial
threat is illusory, since the pre-emptive action itself can always be held out as the reason for the
failure of the threat to materialize (Massumi, 2007; see also Cooper, 2006).
Experimentation works in a subtly different fashion, because it seeks to demonstrate the
presumed or hoped-for future – for instance a solar-powered neighbourhood or low-carbon,
low-energy dependent housing form (see ‘Two vignettes’ section) – by literally constructing it
in the present. The infrastructures created by experimentation must serve both the logics of
the present and the future, and as a result experimentation creates much more durable but
also more contradictory expressions of the future than the exercises, scenarios and
enactments Anderson, Collier or others refer to, which in some sense remain outside the
material realities of the everyday present (see also Adey and Anderson, 2012).
Experimentation follows a pre-emptive logic in the sense that the anticipated future
shapes the present, but rather than being largely unknown, it is the proximate and
unfolding – if still uncertain – threat of climate change around which responses are
configured. Moreover, as the vignettes we opened this paper with show, experimentation
simultaneously sees climate change as a risk and opportunity, and like similar neoliberal
rationalities in which the need to respond to threat is framed as creating space for new, more
positive futures, is animated by this utopic of the future.
Experiments are in this sense passage points at the intersection of the ‘now’ and the ‘not
yet’; they are liminal and ambivalent, yet charged with political potential, creating specific
dynamics of power, capacity and responsibility at the intersection between the present and
the future. Experimentation most closely conforms to Anderson’s (2010) performative mode
of practice, but the styles and logics it assembles also reflect an intention to demonstrate
futures in relation to the present in ways that are arguably underplayed in the literatures on
anticipatory action and governing futures. Foucault’s concept of ‘heterotopia’ provides a
very useful analytical lens through which to understand and unpack the material, spatial,
and political dimensions of how experimentation simultaneously metabolises the future
and present.

Heterotopia and the performance of urban climate governance

Foucault developed the idea of heterotopia for two French radio broadcasts about utopia in
December 1966, and condensed his notes into a lecture entitled ‘Des espaces autres’ that he
gave to a group of architects and planners in March 1967. Despite reportedly not being fond
of the ideas himself, just before his death in 1984 he allowed this lecture version to be
published by the journal Architecture Mouvement Continuite´, from which it was
posthumously translated into English, appearing as ‘Of Other Spaces’ in Diacritics in
1986 (Johnson, 2013; Saldanha, 2008). Foucault’s concern was to explain those spaces
‘that have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a
way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate,
mirror, or reflect’ (Foucault, 1986: 24). Utopias are undoubtedly such places, but they lack
material form; as Foucault put it, ‘Utopias are sites with no real place’ (Foucault, 1986: 24).
So to describe the real places with these utopian characteristics, Foucault thus appropriated
the term ‘heterotopia’ from anatomy where, as Hetherington (1997: 42) explains, it refers to
358 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36(2)

‘parts of the body that are either out of place, missing, extra, or, like tumours, alien’.
For Foucault (1986: 24), heterotopias ‘are something like counter-sites, a kind of
effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found
within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.’ One way to
understand heterotopias is as ‘spaces out of place’ – spaces defined by their otherness to
the society in which they are located. This is what Foucault is denoting by calling them
‘counter-sites’. But heterotopias are much more than just ‘spaces out of place’, since they
exist only in relation to utopia. Heterotopias, then, are real spaces which challenge modes of
thinking, which embody in themselves the changes required to reorder society (Hetherington,
1997). They are the by-products created when utopian thinking is converted into practices, or
as Maassen puts it ‘The outcomes of attempts to orchestrate necessarily deviate, or ‘‘drift’’ into
imperfect and partial versions of the original utopian intention’ (2012: 64). Heterotopias are
defined by being real, material spaces with the characteristic of ‘belonging’ both in the
(utopian) future and the present. Whereas utopias exist only in the future, heterotopias exist
also in the present, and as a result are constantly in tension with the present that they occupy.
We might see them as spaces in which futures are melted with the present. They are not wholly
driven by logics of precaution, pre-emption or preparedness in relation to risk (Anderson,
2010) – though all of these might be present to varying degrees – but also contain the intention
to enact transformation towards a better future.
The concept of heterotopia diffused through geography and cognate disciplines largely as
a result of Ed Soja’s use of the term in his influential 1989 book Postmodern Geographies, in
which he fused Foucault’s method of heterotopology with Lefebvre’s work on the ‘right to
the city’ to construct a new way of thinking about space he termed ‘thirdspace’ (Johnson,
2013; Saldanha, 2008). Since then, its primary use has been to open up to analysts the idea
that social differences necessarily coexist because of their spatial outworkings (Saldanha,
2008), and Johnson (2013: 796) draws up a long list of sites which have been cited as
examples of heterotopia. This list highlights a prominent criticism of the term, namely
that it is ill-defined and could feasibly describe any number of spaces. But Saldanha
(2008) develops a more focussed critique, arguing that heterotopia retains a commitment
to structuralism in that it situates some spaces as counter to all other spaces, with the effect
that ‘heterotopology inherently contains a danger – though perhaps not an imperative – to
simplify spatial difference’ (Saldanha, 2008: 2093). Saldanha’s concern is that this
simplification ‘hinders a geography of mobility, unevenness, and differentials of power’
(2008: 2081). This is undoubtedly true at one level. Heterotopia are not the only places
which can be conceptualized as ‘other’ to society more broadly, but contrasting particular
places with ‘society as a whole’ does not necessarily require assigning a totality to society in
the structuralist sense.
We – like Johnson (2013) – believe the concept still has substantial analytical purchase.
A singular strength of Foucault’s ideas is their flexibility and adaptability (Walters, 2012).
Foucault provides us with a rich pastiche of analytical tools and concepts which have
‘proved highly capable of registering all manner of subtle (and not so subtle) shifts in the
rationalities, technologies, strategies and identities of governance’ (Walters, 2012: 3; see also
Li, 2007). In this open and critical spirit, we find Kevin Hetherington’s reading of
heterotopia particularly helpful. Hetherington applies the notion of heterotopia to the
Palais Royal in late 18th century Paris, arguing that

Heterotopia are sites associated with alternate modes of social ordering that are expressions of a
utopic spatial play. They are the spaces, defined as Other, relationally, within a spatializating
process, which, I believe, have this distinct utopic associated with them. Almost like laboratories,
Edwards and Bulkeley 359

they can be taken as the sites in which new ways of experimenting with ordering society are tried
out. (Hetherington, 1997: 12)

For Hetherington the significance of heterotopia is not that they provide space for
expressions of resistance or disdain for society, but that ‘they act as obligatory points of
passage through which an alternate mode of social ordering is performed’ (1997: 37). So it is
through and in heterotopia that new social orders emerge. In Hetherington’s example, the
Palais Royal was a ‘site of pleasure, consumption and civility’ but also ‘associated with
the issues of politics and resistance’ (p. 4) where there existed ‘a strange combination of
the socially central with the socially marginal’ (p. 6). It was this heterotopic quality which
allowed it to stage a dialogue and transition between the Ancien Regime (the present) and
modernity (the future), to create real political effects.
Hetherington’s reading of heterotopia draws out four key characteristics of heterotopia
which we think are productive in examining how climate change experimentation modulates
the relationship between the present and the future: (1) they are expressions of a utopic
spatial play; (2) they are ambivalent; (3) they are discordant; and (4) they stage an interplay
between the present and future with political effects. Let us turn to these now.

A heterotopology of climate change experimentation

In this section we consider each characteristic in turn, drawing on the two vignettes of
climate change experimentation with which we opened the paper to illustrate our analysis.
This analysis does two things. Firstly, it establishes that heterotopia is an appropriate way to
conceptualize climate change experiments. Secondly, it argues that the lens of heterotopia is
particularly useful for helping us to understand the effects of and importance of performative
modes of practice in governing futures. In particular, it provides a way of seeing and
understanding the politics of precariousness and ambivalence that experimentation
creates. In a context where cities and societies are governed through futures, heterotopia
is therefore a useful vocabulary and method for analysing the critical relation between
present and future.

Utopic spatial play

The first characteristic of a heterotopia that Hetherington identifies is that it expresses ‘a
utopic spatial play’ (1997: 12). It gives spatial form to a particular utopian vision. The Palais
Royal embodied the shift from feudalism to modernity – a radically different social order
structured around the idea of freedom. Climate change experiments give spatial form to a
slightly different utopic: that of climate change. Experiments are undoubtedly energised and
brought into being by logics of anticipation. But whereas the literature on anticipatory
action (Adey and Anderson, 2012; Anderson, 2010; Aradau, 2010; Aradau and Van
Munster, 2007; Collier, 2008; Collier and Lakoff, 2008; Massumi, 2007) focusses on the
logic of ‘risk’ (Beck, 1992) which has also been seen as key logic in climate change
(Dalby, 2013; Oels, 2013), climate change experiments supplement this logic with that of
‘opportunity’. That is, they see climate change as both a risk to the city as it currently is and
an opportunity to forge a better, more liveable, and more just city, and seek to give spatial
and material form to this logic. We might add a fourth anticipatory logic of ‘transformation’
to Anderson’s (2010) trilogy of precaution, preparedness and pre-emption. Climate change
provides the possibility of re-imagining and (literally) re-constructing blighted, tired
industrial cities into dynamic, cultural, ‘eco’ cities, by mobilizing the utopian discourses of
360 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36(2)

creating a lower-carbon and more liveable city that are capable of unlocking both public and
private purses in ways that facilitate significant interventions in the infrastructure of the city
(Edwards and Bulkeley, 2017).
In both Philadelphia and Berlin, the need for material renovation and social revitalization
was driven by structural factors which pre-existed any sensibility to climate change or
imperative to decarbonise. Both emerged as 19th century industrial powerhouses, but in
recent years have struggled with poverty compounded by the effects of deindustrialisation.
In Philadelphia, the inner city has long been and remains overwhelmingly poor and black
(Bauman, 1987; City of Philadelphia, 2011; Schade et al., 2008), and Adams observes that
incomes in the central city declined still further from 73% of suburban incomes in 1980 to
only 61% in 2000 (Adams et al., 2008: 30). The Cold War partition of Berlin created an
absolute divide between the capitalist west and communist east, with large parts of East
Berlin left to decay even as infrastructure including water, gas and electricity networks were
duplicated for security reasons (Campbell, 1999; Moss, 2009). Both cities have also found
their finances perpetually strained at both public and personal levels. After the initial
euphoria following the fall of the Berlin Wall, reductions in federal subsidies created such
a severe budgetary crisis for the city that the privatization agenda pursued by the Senate
seems almost unavoidable (Monstadt, 2007). In Philadelphia, the post-Global Financial
Crisis recession drained public finances to the extent that even the rather boosterish
Citywide Vision: Philadelphia 2035 (City of Philadelphia, 2011) cannot gloss over the city’s
financial woes.
This context of budgetary austerity makes it more notable that both the Coolest Block
Contest and Solar Atlas proved able to mobilize considerable capital from public and private
sources. In both cases, the utopic of climate change – specifically the idea of a wholesale
transformation to a more sustainable and more just city – was central to this ability.
Consider again how the interventions were justified in the opening section of the paper:
Philadelphia as a healthier, safer, greener community; Berlin as having a particular
responsibility for climate protection. In Philadelphia, climate change unlocked for what at
heart was little more than a home improvement scheme both the very-substantial funding
stream provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (2009) under which
significant tranches of funding were available for energy efficiency works, and some
$500,000 for the Contest alone from the Dow Foundation (Interviewee, MOS). In Berlin,
climate change was the justification for funding injections from the European Fund for
Regional Development, the entrepreneurial Dachkampagne (‘roof campaign’) which was
engaged to promote the project (Interviewees, Berlin Senate, Berlin Partner, Solar
Entrepreneur), and ultimately, building owners.
The idea of the wholesale transformation of the city is a powerful utopic because it
facilitates action on pressing challenges of urban poverty and revitalization which have
very little to do with climate change. In this context, experiments both challenge the
adequacy of the city as it currently is (for instance poor, deprived, unmaintained,
divided), and reinforce and reflect the processes which produce division, decay and
deprivation. But by simultaneously performing according to the logics of an imagined
utopian future and the existing social order, they open up possibilities for the city to be
otherwise and demonstrate the way that this future can be made real, somewhat like the e-
waste hacks described by Delgado and Callén (2017). Their politics is not universal.
Wholesale transformation of the city is out of reach. To paraphrase Foucault, they
simultaneously represent, contest, and invert the high-carbon divided, post-industrial,
capitalist city, but through this performance they stage an encounter with and a new city
arranged according to various utopian logics, and the experiments themselves are partial and
Edwards and Bulkeley 361

fragmented manifestations of these logics (Foucault, 1986; Hetherington, 1997). It is

important to note that while low-carbon is a constant in the utopic of climate change,
other utopian ideals are less pervasive and may even be incompatible. For instance, for
some climate change holds out the possibility of a city (re)made socially just,
characterised by ideas such as inclusiveness or community, whereas for others climate
change holds out of the possibility of a new climate economy which allows the pursuit of
new forms of accumulation.

Ambivalence
The second characteristic of heterotopia is their ambivalence. The Palais Royal was the
promenade and domain of the pre-Revolutionary feudal elites even as it gave space for
the development and expression of a whole variety of Revolutionary ideas. Indeed, its
valorization by these elites arguably underpinned its ability to prefigure the onset of
modernity by acting as the space in which the core tenets of modernity could be
expressed, where the Revolution could be performed and indeed planned. Climate change
experiments, likewise, give expression to and stand as examples of lower carbon urbanism;
spaces which validate the kind of boasts about city status and liveability seen in the opening
section of this paper. Yet just as the Palais Royal served first and foremost the needs and
desires of present elites, our vignettes are points of intervention of government and capital,
infrastructures created out of the needs and desires of high carbon lifestyles. Because of this,
they are deeply ambivalent spaces, neither entirely driven by the high-carbon logics of the
present city nor entirely able to transcend them, since the infrastructures they create are both
situated within the present city and must connect to it.
Experimentation moves beyond imagination or even calculation of possible futures by
drawing the future into the present through performance (Anderson, 2010), and this
performance has the paradoxical effect of coupling experiments ever more tightly to the
existing urban milieu. As a result, they simultaneously mobilize utopian and pragmatic
discourses. The Coolest Block Contest appealed both to a sensibility about climate change
as a threat to society and also the rising cost of energy or the discomfort of life in poorly
insulated homes (Interviewees, MOS, ECA, Dow). Similarly, respondents in Berlin stressed
the dual motivations for installing solar panels. A representative from the Berlin Energy
Agency, a powerful quasi-public consultancy focussed on energy efficiency, explained that
‘you have to do something for climate protection but in the end it’s always they ask ‘‘OK
what does this cost’’ and then you have to have the answer, you have to have the right
financial models and you have to have good examples in hand which show it’s reasonable
and it’s doable’. A solar entrepreneur was even more direct: ‘I’ve never heard of someone
who does it only for the climate, it’s all about the money’.
The ambivalence of climate change experiments frustrates the utopic – the ideals and
aspirations – of their proponents. In Philadelphia, the aspiration of the Coolest Block
Contest is to improve the decaying rooftops of the city, yet the elastomeric, ‘climate
friendly’ roof coating cannot be installed without a certain level of structural integrity
which inherently excludes many. So climate change facilitates more renovation than was
previously possible, but it is still not universally accessible. Likewise, despite the ECA’s
history in facilitating weatherization of low income homes, neither the Coolest Block
contest nor the EnergyWorks program which most directly drew on the publicity it
created target this sector of society. Instead, the Coolest Block targeted those with
abundant community spirit and adequately maintained roofs, and EnergyWorks targets
those with credit ratings sufficient to enable them to access the low-interest finance at
362 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36(2)

the heart of the scheme, and even amongst tested households the rejection rate is 40%. The
emergence and continued existence of experiments within the city requires a certain
ambivalence to the contradictions between their utopian aspiration to test out the
possibilities of the future city and the political, economic and social challenges of the
present which they also respond to. In exercises, scenarios or enactments (Adey and
Anderson, 2012; Collier, 2008), the challenge is their transience, and suspension of
disbelief is essential to overcome this transience and generate the affective registers by
which the future is made present (Massumi, 2007). In experiments, the challenge is rather
their permanence or obduracy, and the challenge is to find a way to hold together the
incompatibility of the futures they perform and the present they inhabit. Ambivalence
facilitates this, but at the cost of limiting the realisation of their utopian aspiration of
low-carbon liveability; in this case making it accessible for some but not others (Maassen,
2012). Like Delgado and Callén’s hacks, the ambivalence of experiments facilitates a ‘politics
of demonstration that relies not on the production and display of evidence, but on
the production and display of a precarious relationality’ (2017: 189; see also Corsı́n
Jiménez, 2014a)

Discordance
The third characteristic of heterotopia is that they are discordant spaces. The discordance of
the Palais Royal is driven by the multiple currents it was situated within; it was a space in
which promenading elites mixed with eager nouveau riche bourgeoisie, Enlightenment
philosophers and all manner of ‘common’ people attracted by the spectacle or the circus
entertainments (Hetherington, 1997). It was a counter-site located within Paris which
provided the opportunity to experiment with new social orderings based around the idea
of freedom. Climate change experiments are similarly discordant. They are counter-sites
which by their very experimental nature are circumscribed and limited yet sanctioned and
valorized; laboratories for experimenting with new social orderings based around the idea of
low carbon. Residents in Philadelphia can drive their large petrol car up to their low-carbon,
cool-roofed home, then turn up their (ultimately) coal-powered air-conditioners safe in the
knowledge that their electricity bills are lower due to the recently-retrofitted insulation
upgrades. The solar energy from newly-installed panels in Berlin is fed into an electricity
grid dominated by lignite-fired generators. Experiments can exist in the present, in other
words, only because they are contained to specific areas or domains of the city, and
their extent and influence is governed by the logics of the present, both economic,
political and social.
Yet the future they prefigure is radically uncertain, because experiments are in fact
performances of multiple, perhaps incompatible, futures. The futures they perform are
utopic – they are all regarded as improvements on current conditions – but in fact not all
of those futures are actually possible in the same space. It is the discordance of the
experiment that allows them to occupy one space, to be momentarily compatible, held
together, and therefore resolvable. So in Philadelphia the ECA sees the Coolest Block
Contest as a step towards a future defined by manageable utility bills and better
maintained, more liveable homes. The future envisioned by Dow includes greater use of
its Building and Construction Division’s products; and the MOS hopes to stimulate the take-
up of cool roofs in aid of its vision to make Philadelphia the ‘greenest city in North
America.’ In Berlin, likewise, the actors involved seek to give shape to divergent
expressions of the future through the Solar Atlas. For the Berlin Senate, the reduction in
fossil fuel dependence and energy independence were key components of the future, whereas
Edwards and Bulkeley 363

for Berlin Partner it was the city’s attractiveness potential investors, which suggests a much
less radical departure from the present. These divergent futures became particularly visible in
how the experiments were mediated and presented to different constituencies. So in addition
to the ‘Block Party’ described in the opening section of the paper, where a cherry-picker was
on hand to show off the cool roof coating, the Coolest Block Contest featured in a YouTube
video expounding the benefits of the various Dow products, and was also promoted by the
MOS through a ‘road trip’ of congressional staffers bussed in to see the retrofits for
themselves. In Berlin, the Solar Atlas was promoted to industry professionals at trade
fairs, to potential investors at the Business Location Centre, and (belatedly) to
homeowners through the Dachkampagne. The point here is not that heterotopia exposes
the uncontrollability and uncertainty of the future. Work on governing futures has shown
how futures remain uncontrollable in the context of exercises, scenarios and the like due to
the vitality of the material conditions they create (Adey and Anderson, 2012; Aradau, 2010;
Lundborg and Vaughan-Williams, 2011), and related work on governing uncertainty has
established that biopolitical governance is not so much concerned with eliminating
uncertainty as governing through it (Aradau and Van Munster, 2007; Cooper, 2006;
Dillon and Reid, 2001; see Dalby, 2013 for an intervention directly on climate change).
The point is that heterotopia helps explain how the ambivalence and discordance of
experiments shapes the form of the future that ultimately gains traction. Bulkeley and
Castán Broto (2013: 367–368) argued that ‘experiments could provide grist in the urban
mill, creating conflict, sparking controversy, offering the basis for contested new regimes of
practice’, and a heterotopic reading of experiments explains how this process operates: their
ambivalence and discordance is a disposition through which they are able to hold together
divergent utopics of the future in particular spatial arrangements and also keep them in
dialogue with the existing urban milieu.

Interplay
The fourth characteristic of heterotopia is that their ambivalence and discordance is
ultimately driven by the interplay between the present and future. Hetherington argues
that the Palais Royal is constituted by

an interplay between freedom and order that is both informed by and has helped to shape a
utopics of modernity. The issues, then, are the relationship between utopics and the production
of heterotopic sites, and the effects that that relationship has had in the process of modern social
ordering. (Hetherington, 1997: 13)

What he is saying is that the interaction of future social norms (freedom) and present ones
(order) in the space of the Palais Royal had the effect of shaping how modernity was
imagined and pursued; that it was how the utopian view of modernity was performed in
the Palais Royal (a heterotopic space) which shaped the actual changes to social order which
accompanied the Revolution. A similar interplay underlies the ambivalence and discordance
of climate change experiments discussed in this section so far: to paraphrase Hetherington,
experiments are constituted by an interplay between high and low-carbon which is both
informed by and shapes the utopics of climate change. They produce the future by
enacting the utopics of the future in the present. As a result, it is not the act of
performance which disrupts the high-carbon logics of the present. The power generated
by solar panels in Berlin, for instance, flows into the same grid primarily used as a
conduit for fossil-fuel electricity, and the energy savings made by the 1200 Wolf St Block
are imperceptible in the context of Philadelphia’s overall energy use. It is the logics they
364 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36(2)

create and re-create which prove highly disruptive. Both the Solar Atlas and the Coolest
Block Contest re-write the logics of individual and community benefit through a low-carbon
logic, the former by enacting a rationality in which renewable energy saves money; the latter
by enacting a rationality in which energy efficiency saves money, improves comfort, and
strengthens community. But though they enact a future in which low-carbon has become
normal – most of the residents of the 1200 Wolf St Block had within a year stopped
consciously considering the climate or even financial benefits of their newly-renovated
homes – these logics only operate as motivators inasmuch as the experiments remain
exceptional within the city. This exposes the precariousness of their existence and their
politics. The Palais Royal ceased to be heterotopic when the Revolution swept modernity
fully into the present; likewise, experiments are suspended in the interstice between the future
and the present, and the interplay this precariousness necessitates creates them as a
particular kind of political spaces. Like e-waste hacks (Delgado and Callén, 2017),
prototypes (Corsı́n Jiménez, 2014a, 2014b) and public demonstrations (Rosental, 2013),
experiments can be understood as the exceptional striving for the mundane. They are
constantly grasping towards utopian futures while always dependent on them remaining
just out of grasp. They simultaneously structure the future according to the logics of the
present and – like precaution or pre-emption (Anderson, 2010; Aradau and Van Munster,
2007; Cooper, 2006; Massumi, 2007) – structure the present according the logics of the
future.
A heterotopic reading exposes the intricate relationship between the present and the
future which experimentation entails. Consider this observation from a young activist in
Berlin, who wanted solar panels installed on the roof of her building:

I just wrote to my housing organisation and it’s a public organisation it is owned by Berlin and
they told me ‘we don’t want to build solar panels on our roof because we don’t have the financial
capacity but we also don’t want to rent a roof to someone else’ . . . because they want to have
the possibility to build it themselves. So they are just wasting the roofs [laughs].

Both the activist and the housing association see solar panels as the future. The activist wants
them installed and the Solar Atlas has allowed her to understand the present benefits.
But lacking the present capital to invest in solar panels, the housing association prefers to
retain the option of installing them in the future, an outcome it considers preferable to
entering an arrangement with a third party to install them presently due perhaps to the
fact that this would be less financially rewarding in the future. The experiment opens a
dialogue between the present and the future, but the interplay between them and the
utopic of climate change shapes the actions of both activist and housing association, in
this case with apparently unfortunate consequences for the climate.

Heterotopia, experimentation and the politics of precariousness

This paper has set out to better understand how urban climate change experimentation
engages with futures. The utopian and dystopian imaginaries which structure much of the
debate about climate change point to the centrality of conversations with the future in
shaping responses to climate change, but the literature on urban experimentation, climate
governance and socio-technical transitions has not devoted much attention to the way
experimentation navigates the interface between the present and the future. There is a
broader literature on governing futures which is concerned with the anticipatory logics of
liberal governance in an age of risk, and focusses primarily on (national) security, read
through a biopolitical lens. This literature opens up a number of very productive lines of
Edwards and Bulkeley 365

enquiry for scholars interested in the urban politics of climate change and experimentalism
as a disposition of urban governance. We have sought to extend this thinking in order to
capture particular modalities of how experimentation engages with futures. We find that
while experimentation is primarily a performative mode of practice (Anderson, 2010), it is a
much more durable expression of the future than the exercises, scenarios and enactments the
literature discusses. This durability, and the embedded materiality of experiments, makes
them more obdurate but also more precarious, since they must secure and justify themselves
according to logics which reference both the future/s they anticipate and the present milieu in
which they are embedded. Moreover, experiments address both uncertainty and its more
radical cousin indeterminacy. As a consequence, they do not operate only according to a
‘risk’ logic, but also according to a ‘transformation’ logic that is intertwined with their
dependence on the utopic of climate change. Like other forms of liberal governance,
experimentation understands the future as an opportunity as well as a threat. As a result,
the styles and logics of anticipation that experimentation assembles reflect not only an
intention to manage risk, but are a manifestation of the ways in which new forms of
improvement of the present are intricately intertwined with futures.
We therefore propose that Foucault’s concept of ‘heterotopia’ is a valuable analytical lens
to supplement and extend the existing work on governing futures with respect to
experimentation. We have argued that four key intertwined and interlinked characteristics
of heterotopia are productive in examining how climate change experiments modulate the
relationship between the present and the future: (1) they give spatial form to a distinct
utopic; (2) they are ambivalent; (3) they are discordant; and (4) they are constituted by an
interplay between present and future which animates them. According to this reading of
heterotopia, our argument is that climate change experiments are heterotopias.
This analysis highlights several things. Firstly, the relationship between the utopic and its
spatial outworkings is critical in shaping both the potential of experimentation and the
politics of experimentation-based urban governance. When multiple (often incompatible)
utopian visions are inscribed on the city through the transformation of real spaces and
places, these spaces become temporary sites of political struggle; crucibles in which the
actual future is forged. Climate change experiments are self-consciously framed as spaces
which enact visions of the future city: more climate friendly, lower carbon, more liveable,
and frequently more just. But in material terms they must contend with and interact with the
embedded infrastructure of high carbon, with spatial inequality, and with the prevailing
neoliberal political and economic consensus. This dialogue between future and present,
between aspiration and reality, means experiments are always constituted through
political contestations – both external (over their legitimacy and place in the present city)
and internal (over what futures they seek to actualize and what methods they adopt to do
so). One way that they seek to deal with this tension is through a focussed ambivalence to
both the present and the future. Heterotopia explains why and to what effect experiments are
necessarily ambivalent spaces. It shows that to understand the potential outcomes of
experimentation requires examining not only the patterns of advantage and disadvantage
visible in the present, but also the ways in which visions of the future are actualized in the
present through anticipatory action.
Secondly, experimentation entails a particularly intricate and nuanced dialogue between
the future and the present. Heterotopia calls attention to the way experiments both reflect
and challenge the city as it currently is (poor, deprived, unmaintained, divided, unjust), while
also providing the means through which an alternative low-carbon city is developed. This act
of performing the alternative, desired-for, future (Hetherington, 1997) but according to the
constraints of the present which is so fundamental to climate change experimentation reveals
366 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36(2)

experimental spaces as spaces of utopian hope, of contestation, resistance and struggle over
the form of the future city. In other words, climate politics is just as much located in the
performance of experimentation as in the corridors of UNFCCC meetings, and heterotopia
provides the lens to facilitate this view. These politics are then reflected in climate governance
more broadly as the experiments themselves – or particular aspects of them – find traction,
creating topological shifts in the metabolic circulations of both the cities in which they are
located and in other cities (Bulkeley et al., 2015). As heterotopic spaces, they exist in a
provisional and ambivalent relationship with the broader urban milieu, but open up
the interstitial spaces within which critical dialogues between the future and present
are constantly being created, and through which the fabric of the city is being made and
remade.

Acknowledgements
Thanks to Ben Anderson for his comments on an earlier version of the paper, and the detailed
comments of the anonymous reviewers, both of which contributed significantly to clarifying and
sharpening the contribution of the paper.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article: Harriet Bulkeley’s ESRC Climate Change Leadership Fellowship (RES-066-
27-0002). Earlier versions were presented in various fora, supported by Gareth Edwards’ British
Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant (SG121306) and the INOGOV COST Action (IS1309).

Notes
1. http://ecasavesenergy.org/content/1200-wolf-st-celebrates-becoming-coolest-block
2. http://building.dow.com/media/news/2010/20100513a.htm
3. http://www.businesslocationcenter.de/wab/maps/solaratlas/
4. http://totallythames.org/events/info/jason-decaires-taylor-rising-tide http://www.theguardian.com/
artanddesign/2015/sep/02/underwater-sculptures-thames-london
5. http://www.postcardsfromthefuture.co.uk/

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Gareth A S Edwards is a lecturer in the School of International Development at the

University of East Anglia. His research adopts a critical justice lens to appraise and
critique society-nature relations, frequently sitting at the intersection between political
Edwards and Bulkeley 369

ecology and environmental justice. Recent work has focussed on the neoliberalization of
Australian water governance, the urban governance of climate change, and the theorization
and politics of climate justice, and he is co-author of An Urban Politics of Climate Change
(2015). Gareth is currently examining the political ecology of coal in the context of climate
change.

Harriet Bulkeley is a professor of Geography, Durham University. Her research focuses on

environmental governance and the politics of climate change, energy and sustainable cities.
Recent books include An Urban Politics of Climate Change (2015) and Accomplishing
Climate Governance (2016). She leads the 7.8M Euro H2020 ‘Naturvation’ project
examining the role of urban innovation in the arena of nature based solutions for
sustainable development and is extending her work on climate governance through the
H2020 ‘ReInvent’ project examining the politics of decarbonisation beyond the energy
sector. Her work also includes research on the politics and practice of smart grids in cities
in the UK, Australia and Sweden and with the JPI Urban ‘Governing Urban Sustainability
Transitions’ project work on how urban living laboratories are emerging as a form of
sustainability governance.